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arXiv:2408.16750 · Quantum

Entanglement of Disjoint Intervals in Dual-Unitary Circuits: Exact Results

Alessandro Foligno, Bruno Bertini

Published Mar 26, 2025• 7 citations
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Abstract

The growth of the entanglement between two disjoint intervals and its complement after a quantum quench is regarded as a dynamical chaos indicator. Namely, it is expected to show qualitatively different behaviours depending on whether the underlying microscopic dynamics is chaotic or integrable. So far, however, this could only be verified in the context of conformal field theories. Here we present an exact confirmation of this expectation in a class of interacting microscopic Floquet systems on the lattice, i.e., dual-unitary circuits. These systems can either have zero or a super extensive number of conserved charges: the latter case is achieved via fine-tuning. We show that, for almost all dual unitary circuits on qubits and for a large family of dual-unitary circuits on qudits the asymptotic entanglement dynamics agrees with what is expected for chaotic systems. On the other hand, if we require the systems to have conserved charges, we find that the entanglement displays the qualitatively different behaviour expected for integrable systems. Interestingly, despite having many conserved charges, charge-conserving dual-unitary circuits are in general not Yang-Baxter integrable.

DOI
10.22331/q-2025-03-26-1678

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The growth of the entanglement between two disjoint intervals and its complement after a quantum quench is regarded as a dynamical chaos indicator. Namely, it is expected to show qualitatively different behaviours depending on whether the underlying microscopic dynamics is chaotic or integrable. So far, however, this could only be verified in the context of conformal field theories. Here we present an exact confirmation of this expectation in a class of interacting microscopic Floquet systems on the lattice, i.e., dual-unitary circuits. These systems can either have zero or a super extensive number of conserved charges: the latter case is achieved via fine-tuning. We show that, for almost all dual unitary circuits on qubits and for a large family of dual-unitary circuits on qudits the asymptotic entanglement dynamics agrees with what is expected for chaotic systems. On the other hand, if we require the systems to have conserved charges, we find that the entanglement displays the qualitatively different behaviour expected for integrable systems. Interestingly, despite having many conserved charges, charge-conserving dual-unitary circuits are in general not Yang-Baxter integrable.
The entanglement in operator space is a well established measure for the complexity of quantum many-body dynamics. In particular, that of local operators has recently been proposed as dynamical chaos indicator, i.e. as a quantity able to discriminate between quantum systems with integrable and chaotic dynamics. For chaotic systems the local-operator entanglement is expected to grow linearly in time, while it is expected to grow at most logarithmically in the integrable case. Here we study the dynamics of local-operator entanglement in dual-unitary quantum circuits, a class of "statistically solvable" quantum circuits that we recently introduced. We identify a class of ``completely chaotic" dual-unitary circuits where the local-operator entanglement grows linearly and we provide a conjecture for its asymptotic behaviour which is in excellent agreement with the numerical results. Interestingly, our conjecture also predicts a ``phase transition" in the slope of the local-operator entanglement when varying the parameters of the circuits.
The entanglement in operator space is a well established measure for the complexity of quantum many-body dynamics. In particular, that of local operators has recently been proposed as dynamical chaos indicator, i.e. as a quantity able to discriminate between quantum systems with integrable and chaotic dynamics. For chaotic systems the local-operator entanglement is expected to grow linearly in time, while it is expected to grow at most logarithmically in the integrable case. Here we study the dynamics of local-operator entanglement in dual-unitary quantum circuits, a class of "statistically solvable" quantum circuits that we recently introduced. We identify a class of ``completely chaotic" dual-unitary circuits where the local-operator entanglement grows linearly and we provide a conjecture for its asymptotic behaviour which is in excellent agreement with the numerical results. Interestingly, our conjecture also predicts a ``phase transition" in the slope of the local-operator entanglement when varying the parameters of the circuits.
The entanglement in operator space is a well established measure for the complexity of the quantum many-body dynamics. In particular, that of local operators has recently been proposed as dynamical chaos indicator, i.e. as a quantity able to discriminate between quantum systems with integrable and dynamics. For systems the local-operator entanglement is expected to grow linearly in time, while it is expected to grow at most logarithmically in the integrable case. Here we study local-operator entanglement in dual-unitary quantum circuits, a class of statistically solvable quantum circuits that we recently introduced. We identify a class of completely chaotic dual-unitary circuits where the local-operator entanglement grows linearly and we provide a conjecture for its asymptotic behaviour which is in excellent agreement with the numerical results. Interestingly, our conjecture also predicts a phase transition in the slope of the local-operator entanglement when varying the parameters of the circuits.
After quantum quenches in many-body systems, finite subsystems evolve nontrivially in time, eventually approaching a stationary state. In typical situations, the reduced density matrix of a given subsystem begins and ends this endeavor as a low-entangled vector in the space of operators. This means that if its entanglement in the operator space initially grows (which is generically the case), it must eventually decrease, describing a barrier-shaped curve. Understanding the shape of this ``entanglement barrier'' is interesting for three main reasons: (i) it quantifies the dynamics of entanglement in the (open) subsystem; (ii) it gives information on the approximability of the reduced density matrix by means of matrix product operators; and (iii) it shows qualitative differences depending on the type of dynamics undergone by the system, signaling quantum chaos. Here we compute exactly the shape of the entanglement barriers described by different R\'enyi entropies after quantum quenches in dual-unitary circuits initialized in a class of solvable matrix product states (MPS)s. We show that, for free (SWAP-like) circuits, the entanglement entropy behaves as in rational conformal field theories (CFT)s. On the other hand, for completely chaotic dual-unitary circuits, it behaves as in holographic CFTs, exhibiting a longer entanglement barrier that drops rapidly when the subsystem thermalizes. Interestingly, the entanglement spectrum is nontrivial in the completely chaotic case. Higher R\'enyi entropies behave in an increasingly similar way to rational CFTs, such that the free and completely chaotic barriers are identical in the limit of infinite replicas (i.e., for the so called min-entropy). We also show that, upon increasing the bond dimension of the MPSs, the barrier maintains the same shape. It simply shifts to the left to accommodate for the larger initial entanglement.
The linear growth of entanglement after a quench from a state with short-range correlations is a universal feature of many body dynamics. It has been shown to occur in integrable and chaotic systems undergoing either Hamiltonian, Floquet or circuit dynamics and has also been observed in experiments. The entanglement dynamics emerging from long-range correlated states is far less studied, although no less viable using modern quantum simulation experiments. In this work, we investigate the dynamics of the bipartite entanglement entropy and mutual information from initial states which have long-range entanglement with correlation between antipodal points of a finite and periodic system. Starting from these crosscap states, we study both brickwork quantum circuits and Hamiltonian dynamics and find distinct patterns of behaviour depending on the type of dynamics and whether the system is integrable or chaotic. Specifically, we study both dual unitary and random unitary quantum circuits as well as free and interacting fermion Hamiltonians. For integrable systems, we find that after a time delay the entanglement experiences a linear in time decrease followed by a series of revivals, while, in contrast, chaotic systems exhibit constant entanglement entropy. On the other hand, both types of systems experience an immediate linear decrease of the mutual information in time. In chaotic systems this then vanishes, whereas integrable systems instead experience a series of revivals. We show how the quasiparticle and membrane pictures of entanglement dynamics can be modified to describe this behaviour, and derive explicitly the quasiparticle picture in the case of free fermion models which we then extend to all integrable systems.
Abstract Many-body quantum dynamics defined on a spatial lattice and in discrete time—either as stroboscopic Floquet systems or quantum circuits—has been an active area of research for several years. Being discrete in space and time, a natural question arises: when can such a model be viewed as evolving unitarily in space as well as in time? Models with this property, which sometimes goes by the name space-time duality, have been shown to have a number of interesting features related to entanglement growth and correlations. One natural way in which the property arises in the context of (brickwork) quantum circuits is by choosing dual unitary gates: two site operators that are unitary in both the space and time directions. We introduce a class of models with q states per site, defined on the square lattice by a complex partition function and paremeterized in terms of q × q Hadamard matrices, that have the property of space-time duality. These may interpreted as particular dual unitary circuits or stroboscopically evolving systems, and generalize the well studied self-dual kicked Ising model. We explore the operator dynamics in the case of Clifford circuits, making connections to Clifford cellular automata (Schlingemann et al 2008 J. Math. Phys. 49 112104) and in the q → ∞ limit to the classical spatiotemporal cat model of many body chaos (Gutkin et al 2021 Nonlinearity 34 2800). We establish integrability and the corresponding conserved charges for a large subfamily and show how the long-range entanglement protocol discussed in the recent paper (Lotkov et al 2022 Phys. Rev. B 105 144306) can be reinterpreted in purely graphical terms and directly applied here.